Chapter XV

He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all
burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to
the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the
doctor's stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his
cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into
oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He
heard the doctor's chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an
unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump
up, but, holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor.
The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.
Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as
strange. "I suppose it must be so," he thought, and still sat where he
was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the
bedroom, edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the Princess, and took up
his position at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was
some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend,
and he had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face
of Lizaveta Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna's face was stern and pale, and
still as resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were
fixed intently on Kitty. Kitty's swollen and agonized face, a tress of
hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his
eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill
hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly
her face was drawn- she pushed him away.

"Oh, this is awful! I'm dying, I'm dying! Go away!" she shrieked,
and again he heard that unearthly scream.

Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

"It's nothing, it's nothing, it's all right," Dolly called after
him.

But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over.
He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost,
and heard shrieks, howls, such as he had never heard before, and he
knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had
long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child.
He did not even pray for her life now- all he longed for was the
cessation of this awful anguish.

"Doctor! What is it? What is it? My God!" he said, snatching at
the doctor's hand as he came up.

"It's the end," said the doctor. And the doctor's face was so
grave as he said it that Levin took the end as meaning her death.

Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw
was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and
stern. Kitty's face he did not know. In the place where it had been
was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the
sounds that came from it. He fell down with his head on the wooden
framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful
scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it
had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin
could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream
had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried
breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful,
uttered softly: "It's over!"

He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt,
looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in
silence and tried to smile, and could not.

And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful faraway world in which
he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself
all in an instant borne back to the old everyday world, though
glorified now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear
it. The strained chords snapped; sobs and tears of joy which he had
never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook,
and for long they prevented him from speaking.

Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand
before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of
the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot
of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a
flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which
had never existed before, and which would now with the same right,
with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.

"Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!" Levin heard
Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby's back with a
shaking hand.

"Mamma, is it true?" said Kitty's voice.

The Princess's sobs were all the answer she could make.

And in the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply
to the mother's question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices
speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive
squall of the new human being, which had so incomprehensibly appeared.

If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had
died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was
standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now,
coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental
efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the
creature squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her
agony was over. And he was unutterably happy. That he understood;
and he was completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who
was he?... He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him
something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom
himself.